Unravelling the beliefs and practices of EFL teachers related to corrective feedback in Turkey

Abstract

Recent studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have shown that there is an apparent relationship between teachers' beliefs and their classroom practices of oral corrective feedback in second language teaching. Even though many experimental and classroom studies show that it is beneficial for second language acquisition, relatively little research has explored the relationship between beliefs and practices of teachers in terms of oral corrective feedback. This descriptive study aims to examine the relationship between teachers' stated beliefs and their practices about oral corrective feedback in classrooms in a Turkish EFL setting. The data were collected through classroom observations of ten EFL teachers working at a preparatory language school of a privately funded university in Turkey, semi-structured interviews and scenario-based error correction simulation. The results showed that most of the teachers have an awareness of oral corrective feedback and believe that it is useful for students when provided appropriately to avoid touching learners' affective states negatively. Recasts were observed as the most frequently employed feedback type because of its implicit nature, even though most of the instructors reported elicitation as the most effective corrective feedback strategy. In this respect, the results revealed inconsistencies between teachers' stated beliefs and their actual practices about oral corrective feedback; that is, the types of errors corrected in the classroom also showed deviation from the teachers’ stated beliefs.